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Venezuela

Summary of the current situation

Censorship of various media sites by the (state owned) ISP Cantv confirmed. This company holds the monopoly of landlines and ADSL service, which the vast majority of Venezuelans use. Tor connections are now being detected and blocked, obfs bridges currently circumvents this.

People expressing their views against the government are often detained and imprisoned without trial or due process, some simply for expressing discontent in social media. Others have gone into exile and have been given refugee status in various countries. Most of the blocks are against Venezuelans living abroad expressing their opposition to the current regime.

First witnessed

In the past few years, blocking was done by simple DNS spoofing/filtering. Starting in June 2018, people using alternate public DNS servers noticed a new form of block in place, probably by deep packet inspection. This coincided with Tor direct connections being blocked as well. Before June 2018, it was possible to use Tor directly without the need to manually add Tor bridges.

Last witnessed

It is currently ongoing.

Types of Tor censorship

Attempting to connect directly to the Tor network times out, usually around 10% circuit building.

Types of non-Tor censorship

It started with simple DNS spoof/filter of domain names, which is still in effect for a different group of sites. In those cases simply switching to any public DNS circumvents the block.

Ways to bypass censorship

obfs4 bridges obtained by email is currently working to connect to the Tor network.

Type of firewall

Unknown, but Venezuela has close ties with China, Iran and Cuba so they might be sharing technology for censorship.

Reproducing the blocking

Which data and code can be used to reproduce the blocking? Please do not link to packet dumps.